Stephen Grover Cleveland

Grover Cleveland’s reputation begins with a sentence he repeats so often it stops sounding like a slogan and starts sounding like a moral reflex: public office is a public trust. The phrase is spare, almost severe, and it reflects a sensibility forged not in salons or at universities, but in parsonages, law offices, and municipal chambers where the nearest romance is the romance of balancing a column of numbers. He is born Stephen Grover Cleveland in Caldwell, New Jersey, the son of a Presbyterian minister whose sermons leave the family as rich in admonition as they are poor in cash. Early on he learns two permanent lessons: that work is both duty and shelter, and that respectability is not a costume but a habit. When his father dies, the boy goes to work rather than to college, finding in Buffalo a ...